The New Libya Is Free, if You Don’t Count the Jailed Journalists

The Libyan revolution saw a flourishing of independent media. But many have since had to close or cut back due to lack of funds, according to Freedom House. Photo: Magharebia/Flickr

Being a journalist under the autocratic rule of Libyan dictator Moammar Qadhafi was an exercise in choice: between promoting state propaganda and spending time in jail. Now that NATO has toppled the regime, Libya is a little better at letting reporters practice their trade. But the press in Libya is by no means free.

That’s according to human rights watchdog Freedom House, which has just released its latest annual survey of press freedom around the world. While the group says that media in Libya has clearly improved after Qadhafi, the watchdog’s report describes a country where armed groups have taken to intimidating journalists while independent media has gone into retreat. All the while, a new legislature professes to be for freedom of the press — but has attempted to limit it.

Though it’s not all bad news. Freedom House’s practice involves analyzing the legal, political and economic factors of each country, and then assigning them numerical values totaling a maximum of 100 points, which is the worst possible ranking. Since the collapse of the Qadhafi regime — and the autocrat’s death in 2011 — Libya’s rankings have improved in all three categories. A total score of 94 in 2010 when Qadhafi was in charge, which the group termed “Not Free” and “among the most tightly controlled in the world,” has dropped 35 points to a total of 59, or “Partly Free.”

The reason for the relative improvement might be best summed up as instability at least being better than Qadhafi. The United States and NATO helped overthrow the dictator in part to build a more open Libya. But it’s still not free, though. Or even mostly. Journalists have been arbitrarily arrested. Arbitrary imprisonment is still widespread, according to Human Rights Watch, which has documented attacks — including torture and rape — on villagers deemed disloyal.

Michael Hanna, who studies the region at The Century Foundation, says it’s important to remember where Libya came from. “The state does not have a monopoly of violence and does not control many of the militias that are still enforcing security,” Hanna tells Danger Room. “You do have a sort of mixed picture. But when looking at the baseline that is the Qadhafi era, it’s hard to look at that without seeing marked improvement despite all the setbacks and legal uncertainties.”

Politically, Libya’s post-revolution governing body, the General National Council operates under a draft constitution which guarantees (in theory) the freedom of the press, which is a good start, but “the charter does not explicitly abolish censorship or include the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas,” (.pdf) Freedom House noted. The Council’s predecessor, the National Transitional Council, also briefly outlawed — until it was overturned by Libya’s Supreme Court — insults to Islam and the Libyan flag, and glorifying the Qadhafi regime. Likewise, for a time, “false news and information” became illegal, as well as “propaganda” that “endanger(s) national security, terrorize(s) the public or undermine(s) public morale.”

Legally, Libyan media is on tricky ground. Freedom House portrays Libya as a confusing and contradictory environment for journalists to work. Libel and slander laws are unclear. The agencies responsible for licensing and regulating media have been shuffled around to newly-created agencies that soon get dissolved and replaced by others. Worse, a proliferation of armed groups have intimidated journalists away from reporting in “sensitive locations, such as [Qadhafi’s former compound] Bab al-Aziziya,” the report notes. Shady “security agents” have reportedly followed foreign journalists from their hotels, and a Salafi extremist group detained several Libyan journalists who attempted to document the extremists’ bulldozing a 16th century Sufi mausoleum in Tripoli last August.

The economics of Libyan media are also mixed. The good news is that there’s s a lot more media outlets than there were under Qadhafi — when independent media was banned. The problem is that “many of the publications founded in 2011 have closed, mostly because wartime activists have returned to their normal lives or their enterprises lacked equipment, funding, and experience in the media industry. Nevertheless, a large number were still functioning in 2012.”

State-owned television and radio is still on the air, but now face competition from private networks like Libya al-Hurrah, which started as an internet television channel during the revolution. Internet filtering also came to an end, but “the telecommunications infrastructure inherited from the previous regime has yet to be refurbished.”

All is not rosy next door, either. In 2012, Egypt’s ranking worsened from 57 to 62 (.pdf) — the first full year since the American-approved ouster of ex-dictator Hosni Mubarak. Like in Libya, a surge in independent media after the revolution hit an economic wall, with many independent publications closing down after running out of money.

And similar to Libya, a new constitution — in theory — guarantees freedom of the press, “but it allows for limitations based on social, cultural, and political grounds, and prescribes legal punishments for overstepping these limits.” Islamist hard-liners have also agitated for President Mohamed Morsi to enforce those restrictions. But Hanna cautions that we shouldn’t conflate that with Libya, owing to Egypt’s tradition of a controlled opposition press.

“When you look at Egypt, the bounds of discourse have widened, but you also see very specific state-sponsored actions that are aimed at chilling dissent and limiting the scope of freedom of expression,” he says. In other words, you can exchange the old boss for a new one. But that’s not the same as replacing the whole company.